Souls for Sale

Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1923) is Hollywood’s first real love letter to itself, a film made in direct response to the scandals that had rocked the industry in the early 1920s: the Roscoe Arbuckle case, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the drug-related death of Wallace Reid. Hughes, an enormously popular novelist and playwright who was also Howard Hughes’s uncle, adapted his own serialized novel into a Goldwyn production designed to argue that the movie business was populated not by degenerates but by decent, hardworking people. The title cards practically editorialize, describing studio labor as “factory-hard” and insisting on the fundamental virtue of the Hollywood workforce. The story follows Remember “Mem” Steddon (Eleanor Boardman, in her first starring role), a preacher’s daughter who impulsively flees her new husband on their wedding night, stumbles half-dead from dehydration onto a film set in the desert, and falls into the movie business almost by accident. The husband turns out to be a serial killer. The plot is cheerfully absurd, veering from slapstick to melodrama and back, and Hughes knew it. Roger Ebert noted that judging by the title cards, Hughes was fully aware of how improbable his own story was. Boardman is wonderful throughout, particularly in a failed screen test that requires her to convincingly simulate bad acting, a harder trick than it sounds. The real treasure of Souls for Sale is its documentary value. Hughes’s Goldwyn connections gave him access to working sets across Hollywood, and the film is packed with cameos from the era’s biggest names. Erich von Stroheim appears directing a test for Greed. Charlie Chaplin shows up in the director’s chair, likely during the production of A Woman of Paris. Marshall Neilan, Fred Niblo, ZaSu Pitts, and dozens of others drift through. The climax, in which a full-scale circus tent catches fire during filming and the director shouts at his cameramen to keep shooting, is both spectacular and slyly self-aware. The film was thought lost for decades until copies surfaced in Czech film archives and were restored with original tinting intact. It is a fascinating artifact of an industry learning to narrate and defend its own mythology.